


i'll morph to someone else (I'm just a ghost)

by orangepinapple



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-15 04:12:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18491092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orangepinapple/pseuds/orangepinapple
Summary: Jake Peralta knew how to hide. He learned quickly that if you pretended to be someone else it was harder to get hurt.Or, a character study about how Jake deals with feelings.





	i'll morph to someone else (I'm just a ghost)

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I've fallen hardcore into this show,and this thought of Jake being fake and hiding behind his weird humor just showed up in my head. I did write this on a phone :/ so let me know if there's any mistakes. Thanks!

Jake Peralta knew how to hide. He learned quickly that if you pretended to be someone else it was harder to get hurt. He realized soon after that to truly be safe he couldn't just bury the real Jake. He had to cleverly cover up aspects of himself to create minimum exposure.  
  
Jake had always been loud. His mom had thousands of embarrassing stories from the time he could talk. When he turned seven, and his dad left, he went quiet. His mom worried and worried, and then worried some more. Gina was the one who told him he was freaking everyone out and 'seriously killing my vibe' , and he realized the smudges under his mom's eyes might not be just his dad's fault.  
  
After that Jake experimented with how to hide without disappearing.He learned that it was too much work to make up a whole new person, when he could just slightly change his mannerisms to achieve the same goal. Soon Jake found that the best way to protect himself from everyone was to change slightly from person to person.  
  
People believe what they want to be true. All he had to do was play into their expectations. His teachers thought he was an idiot, so he purposely didn't do his best on his tests. His mom thought he had some daddy issues, but was working through them, so he put on a brave face and made jokes around her.  
  
Gina knew him best. He could never tell what she expected, so he eventually ended up being himself around her when they were alone. Sometimes he wondered if that was why she was his only childhood friend he still talked to. She was the only one who really knew him.  
  
By the time he was in the academy, he had perfected his method. He'd also figured it was probably not the most healthy coping mechanism, but he couldn't go back now.  
  
He found a like spirit in Rosa Diaz. She hid her true self too, although she was more direct about it. Whereas Jake put on a false face, Rosa just outright refused to tell anyone anything. This worked to Jake's advantage, as he and Rosa soon became friends(close friends, he thought) without either of them expecting much from the other.  
  
When he started working at the 99, things changed. He couldn't be a different person for everyone, they were too close, too aware, too smart. This wasn't highschool anymore. So he started adjusting his method. He knew how to be flexible, how to act natural when being fake.  
  
Jake stopped changing for people individually, and started making a New Jake. One who was real enough to seem true, but hidden enough that none of these people could break him if they left.  
  
The New Jake was loud, like real Jake. He was both overly conceited and self-deprecating. He was street smart, but book stupid. He played to everyone's expectations, changing minimally depending on who he was with, just like a normal person would.  
  
His biggest tell was his undercover stories. Whenever there was opportunity to make up backstories for himself, for criminals, he took it. He knew how to make a person realistic, how to disguise the truth with different truth. The problem was he got too fantastical with his descriptions, because he wished he could have that story type personality, that romantizied history.  
  
Because truthfully, his history sucked. It was awful and it didn't make his life cool or interesting, it made him the type of person to avoid showing emotion, to hide behind a fake persona, to never have anyone to confide in because he was, in a sense, always undercover.  
  
So, when he went undercover for real, with the Iannuccis, it was easy. Too easy. Almost instantly, Jake Peralta, hard working cop, disappeared, and became Jake Peralta, ex-cop, and a dirty one at that.  
  
With one fell swoop, the man Jake pretended to be for years was gone. The man he thought he could eventually be, gone, after a day of adjustment. This, more than anything he saw while undercover, shook him up. Jake had thought the New Jake he had built was similar to Real Jake. Similar enough for it not to matter about the slight differences. But if Jake could change so quickly, what did that say about him? Who was he really?  
  
When Jake came back from being undercover, he saw things differently. He could easily slip back into his old shoes, easily become New (Old?) Jake again, but he wasn't sure he wanted to. He thought about being more open, or at least trying to find his real self again, but the thought alone scared him senseless.  
  
He had been this New Jake for so long, he wasn't even sure who the Real Jake was. The last time he was Real Jake his dad left, and Jake knew that all the other feelings he's repressed since were waiting to come back and bite him in the ass.  
  
He wasn't ready to deal with unpacking Real Jake and seeing all the dust gathering. So Jake ignored that, and continued to live as New Jake, even more terrified of falling back into Real Jake. And around him, all his friends continued on, unaware that he was fake, deceptive, and utterly, completely alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Thinking about making this into a series...like certain scenes through the lenses of Jake and his fear of being real. idk. Hope you liked it!


End file.
